Managing inventories of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tagged articles is a common practice in the industry. Numerous commercial applications exist for managing RFID-tagged inventories either in a warehouse type location or in a specific storage cabinet. Typically, the RFID tags are read by an RFID reader when articles enter or exit the warehouse or cabinet, or the warehouse or cabinet are sampled at certain time points in order to determine the inventory levels or specific conditions of the tagged-articles. For example, an RFID tag may contain information about the expiration date of the article, so it could be interesting to read all RFID tags in order to determine the expected shelf life of each article.
One of the main problems that companies marketing high-value items such as medical devices, pharmaceuticals and perfumes, need to overcome is the ability to control different pricing schemes in different geographical regions. Sometimes the difference in prices of the same item in different geographical locations can be very significant. Accordingly, one of the manufacturer's main concerns is to block the possibility of a product destined to be sold in a low price market finding its way to a high price market.
RFID-based inventory systems are common in the industry and a variety of implementations are known. Key-Trac's U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,707,381 and 6,407,665 disclose a container that registers access and exit of objects using a coupled computer outside or inside the container. Key-Trac's container does not include integrated processing capabilities.
American Greetings Corporation's U.S. Pat. No. 6,927,692 establishes a system for real-time management of an inventory with RFID tags using a computing component to manage inventory quantities. It does not provide time-based reports regarding the status of the inventory.
Safety Syringes' U.S. Pat. No. 6,935,560 establishes a medication dispensing unit coupled with a processor unit that registers entry and exit of medications, and issues alerts if inventory quantities fall below a certain threshold.
Techtalion Limited U.S. Pat. No. 6,650,240 discloses a briefcase with articles, wherein the presence of articles inside the briefcase is detected when desired. Alerts are issued if an article is missing. U.S. Pat. No. 6,650,240 only checks the presence or absence of objects when requested, and does not register events in real-time.
In situations where articles without RFID tags are stored in a non-RFID enabled cabinet, it may be easy to fit articles with RFID tags, but a regular cabinet cannot be fitted with efficient RFID reading means in the field. Rather, cabinets adapted to storing RFID-tagged articles are custom made and as such are priced accordingly.
Building a cabinet for storing RFID-tagged articles presents certain challenges to the manufacturer. Some of these challenges include: creating a full RF coverage of the storage areas of the cabinet; having the ability to locate inventory up to shelf level, even when the shelves are very closely located; overcome major RF issues mainly adapting RF antennas in an area where many antennas are on the same surface (fields of planar antennas on the same surface); overcome the influence of the physical location of the cabinet RFID performance; and having full flexibility on easily building any size of antenna needed at the cabinet.
As a result, the antenna or antennae in the cabinet need to be positioned in very specific places in the cabinet in order maximize the coverage of the storage area of the cabinet and minimize interference between the different antennae.
It would be desirable to be able to use existing cabinets and transform them in the field to RFID-enabled cabinets. It would also be desirable to enable the transformed cabinets to read RFID-tagged articles in multiple formats and protocols.
Organizations, such as hospitals, buying large quantities of disposable or renewable articles from different suppliers and manufacturers need to track diligently the inventory levels of these articles in order to replace on time articles that were either consumed or that their shelf life has ended.
On the other hand, suppliers of such disposable or renewable articles do not have a clear idea, and frequently have no idea, how their products are used within a customer organization. It would be highly valuable, for example, for a supplier to know that a given article is depleted or near depletion in one department since the supplier could ship necessary quantities of that article on time to that department.
Hospitals usually buy their medical devices from several suppliers or vendors and lately many hospitals are trying to move to a consignment procurement method. The new inventory methods oblige the hospital to provide suppliers and vendors with easy access to its current inventory level including inventory inside surgery rooms. This creates a great need of remote and seamlessly inventory control. This emerging need is greatly felt especially in the healthcare, telecommunications, and military industries.